All American: The 82nd Airborne In Normandy Progress Update!
New News On Shrapnel's In House Developed Title!

Hampstead, NC, 17 March 2008

All American: The 82nd Airborne In Normandy will soon begin to ship!

Yeah, that's what we'd like to lead off a press release with but unfortunately it won't be
this press release. We'll let those of you who have been expecting to hear those words
pick yourself up off the floor before continuing. No hard feelings, but it did get your
attention, right?

Work does continue on All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy. Yes, it's still
alive. No, we have not abandoned it. Yes, we suck at getting it out the door but we're
still confident we'll beat Duke Nukem Forever to a release date, which was announced a
year prior to All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy. That's gotta count for
something.

So here's what's happening with development at the moment. First, there was that rather
public falling out last year with the lead programmer. That set us back a good bit since
we couldn't leave the code in place and had to bring someone else in. Development got
back up to speed though, and everything was humming along when we encountered a
rather big pothole in the road to release: Microsoft Vista.

Microsoft's Vista, that oh-so wonderful operating system of theirs, has a rather annoying
habit of breaking things in All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy. Like network
play on previous OSes. And there are other issues with Vista. So thanks to this crap OS
we had several choices:

1. Strip All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy of the features that didn't work
with Vista, or had problems under Vista.

2. Not make it Vista compatible. Tempting, very tempting.

3. Recode the whole thing for DOS, since folks will probably have better luck running it
under DOSBox in Vista than if it was Vista compatible.

Stripping features is not an option. Not making it Vista compatible would solve a lot of
headaches but look, after all these years in development we're not going to then shut out
part of the market. And obviously the DOS thing is a joke. Doing it in Flash would be
much better.

If worse comes to worse and the Vista issue continues to impact the ability to get the
game to play on XP we may end up releasing two versions, a Vista-only edition and the
edition for working OSes. We'll try including a sympathy card with the Vista-only
edition.

Thanks Microsoft! Tell us, was Vista released just to push developers towards the 360?
Because at this point we're wondering if we should start developing for consoles instead
and save all the headaches associated with Vista.

For those of you who haven't kept up with the saga of All American: The 82nd Airborne
in Normandy, or haven't even realized that Shrapnel Games was developing their own in-
house title, allow us to bring you up to speed.

All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy is the sequel to the award-winning, best
selling 101st: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy, originally released by Empire
Interactive. Shrapnel Games was formed in 1999 for the sole purpose of bringing the
sequel to the market, but soon became a full fledged independent publishing house.
While regretfully this has caused a delay in bringing All American: The 82nd Airborne in
Normandy to you, we're quite proud of all the great titles we've brought to you under the
Shrapnel Games publishing label over the years, and so ultimately if we had it to do all
over again we wouldn't change a thing.

All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy, like its predecessor, is part skirmish level
tactical wargame, part RPG, and part adventure. Choose your stick of paratroopers for
their skills needed to get the job done, outfit them, and then land in German occupied
France on the eve of the greatest invasion of history to fulfill your objectives. Nine
campaigns encompassing twenty-seven missions are included, and every game is
infinitely replayable thanks to the friction of war. Damage modelling is based on
historical combat wounding reports for unparalleled realism, along with highly detailed
maps of the countryside and equipment ratings.

All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy is now slated for a Q4 2008 release and
will be available for Windows. Even Vista. Which we hate.

And to check out our complete catalog of titles visit us at www.shrapnelgames.com.
Besides all our great games covering a range of unique subject matter and their demos,
we also feature full, non-crippled FREE games such as winSPWW2, winSPMBT, and
Conquest of Elysium II.

The reality is Tim and gang have been devoting effort getting my game off the ground and doing the same for other authors. I wish All American was on the skids ready to ship, but the reality is I am glad it is not - it means my own games gets attention and love needed to get it out the door.